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“Modest reforms to pay and compensation will improve readiness and modernization. It will help keep our all-volunteer force sustainable and strong. Keeping faith also means investing sufficient resources so that we can uphold our sacred obligations to defend the nation and to send our sons and daughters to war with only the best training, leadership and equipment. We can’t shrink from our obligations to one another. The stakes are too high.”

Without Chairman McKeon knowing it, the Department of Defense now relies on the commercial economy to a growing extent. And it is a commercial technology base that plays the central role, not the leviathans of the old defense industrial base. America's technology base, and the global technology base, are producing directly for DoD and are making the parts, software, wiring, communications, optics, and the rest that the leviathans assemble. And this base is highly diversified, making and selling to the commercial economy world-wide. In reality, this technology base is our future.

So no need to lose faith in the debt reduction effort. Buck McKeon just hates that he can’t have his cake and eat it too, but that’s not exactly a matter of national security.